Monday, August 19, 2013

I picked this series up for a buck an issue, but I may have been thinking of another one when I did: from 1994, Aliens: Music of the Spears, written by Chet Williamson, pencils by Tim Hamilton, inks by Timothy Bradstreet.

The series opens with a team of ninjas attacking a secure corporate facility, in a curious act of industrial espionage, to harvest an Alien facehugger egg. It's part of a convoluted plan that leads back to frustrated musician Damon Eddington, who wants the sound of an Alien for his compositions. His employer at Synsound backs Damon's request for his own ulterior motives, namely getting back at a rival corporation's executive that stole his boss's mistress. Damon records every note he can, from the Alien embryo bursting from the chest of a deluded cultist, to the Alien stalking and killing the homeless victims fed to it; but he hasn't quite found the perfect sound yet, nor are the egg's former owners finished looking for it...
As mentioned on previous Aliens posts, this story is set further on in timeline than seen in the movies: by this point, while the Aliens (or Xenomorphs or whatever) are by no means domesticated, they are on occasion harvested for the Alien Queen's royal jelly, which has different effects depending on how it's processed, or the whims of the writer. This time, it's the people's drug of choice, apparently more common and easier to get than any other. The humans have also figured out that the Aliens aren't all one big happy hive, either: a harnessed warrior called "Ol' Blue" is pressed into service as a bloodhound, but hates any hive not his own.
Not my favorite Aliens story, but certainly not unreadable either, if you're a fan who's read a few. This series is very much about sound, though; and that may or may not work for you: I often think comics about music work about as well as, I don't know, songs about fuzziness or something. But again, if you've followed Aliens for a while...you probably can hear it, can't you?